It is five years since India and then Pakistan conducted underground nuclear tests in 1998. They triggered howls of international protest.

India's Prithvi missiles - not just pointed at Pakistan, India says

Amid dire predictions that the
world had moved one step closer to a nuclear holocaust, the United States
and other western countries imposed sanctions and demanded the two countries
disarm.

But the politicians in Delhi and Islamabad had another view.

They argued
that nuclear deterrence had kept the peace between the United States and the
Soviet Union during the Cold War and that it could do the same in South
Asia.

Both countries had possessed nuclear weapons long before 1998.

India first
tested a nuclear bomb in 1974.

Pakistan, by contrast, maintained a policy of
deliberate nuclear ambiguity.

Nevertheless it had first built a workable
nuclear device in 1982 and by the end of the 1980s it was widely accepted by
the international community that Islamabad had become a de facto nuclear
power.

'Significant constraint'

So has the nuclearisation of South Asia deterred war between India and
Pakistan?

The last full-scale war between the two countries was in 1971.

The Indians have come to the
conclusion that the military solution is just not there

Khursheed KasuriPakistan foreign minister

While it is impossible to prove that the risk of a nuclear conflict has
been the overriding factor preventing another all-out conflict, there is
good reason to believe that it has been a significant constraint on policy
makers in both countries.